I had been to Otakon once before, so I
knew what to expect: a huge anime convention consuming the Baltimore
Convention Center (BCC) for two days (really three, but I wouldn’t
be going Sunday), where anime, manga, webcomics, videogames, and
various Japanese cultural elements meet to decide who is truly
uglier: the dude cosplaying Inuyasha, or the fat dudette cosplaying
Tifa?

The BCC was packed last year, and my
friend Ben and I had every reason to believe it would be equally or
more so this time around. So instead of arriving really early on
Friday and standing in a huge—and by huge I mean three
hours—line to register and get into the convention, we opted to
preregister and stand in a line half as long, the day before the
convention.

There is really only one thing of note
regarding the preregistration line: I happened to notice several
signs to the side of the queue, each indicating certain Otakon rules
and regulations.

Here is the actual text from one of the
signs (emphasis added):

--

There will be NO GUNS of any
kind permitted. There are to be no:

Pellet guns

Water guns

Air Guns

Replicas of actual guns

Real guns

Mini or Pistol crossbows

Stun guns

Dart or Blowguns.

--

Here’s what I want to know: why
the hell is “Real guns” fifth
on the list? What, is a Super Soaker a greater threat than a shotgun?
You have to be kidding me...

Once
we had our tickets, we were set. Ben and I planned out what we would
do. He wanted to do gaming, mostly, while I had my heart set out on
crashing any parties at Artists’ Alley. I should mention also
that because Scott Ramsoomair, the creator of one of my favorite
webcomics, VG Cats,
was coming to Otakon all the way from Toronto, I was looking forward
to meeting him and several other members of the VGC forum who, like
me, planned to come see him and get several blurry pictures with no
flash indoors.1

On the online forum, the members had
agreed to gang up on—er, I mean, come see Scott at 1:00 pm on
Friday. There we could hopefully get a group picture.

All was planned and ready to go... All
we had to do was wait for the next day to come.

--

FRIDAY, JULY 30

Ben and I arrived around 9:00, and
because we had picked up our registration badges the day before, we
walked right in, thus skipping a line of at least
ten thousand people waiting to get their registration that morning.
Moral of this story: HAHAHA, SUCKERS!

None of the main events would open
before noon, so we had three hours to kill while not standing in
line. We eventually decided on watching a screening of anime music
videos in one of the smaller BCC theaters. I had watched several of
these the year previous, and I must say, the 2004 crop paled in
comparison to the 2003 videos. They were more boring, for one
thing... Although to be fair, I was pleasantly surprised by the lack
of Evanescence this time around.

At noon I promptly descended on
Artists’ Alley. The artists, of course, had been allowed into
the room early to set up their wares. In all, about 200 artists
shared sections of the tables provided as they tried to sell prints,
sketches, t-shirts, comic books, and various other souvenirs.

I met with the people who do Mac
Hall, a webcomic with a similar
following to VGC, and they thanked me for complimenting their work,
but said, upon my asking, that Scott had not arrived yet.

By 1:00, two other
forum members were waiting with me by the empty section of table
where we thought the VGC artist would eventually come. These
forumites, “Dr. Grumbles” and “Tino,” and I
decided after half an hour to go our separate ways and hope Scott
would arrive later.

Oh well, so not everything was going to
plan... there were still things to do. I went to the Videogame Room
and played some vintage Bomber Man for the Sega Saturn with
total strangers who were much better than I was at blowing things up.
I won once, but only once—and that was the first try, at that.
Maybe there is something to that whole “beginner’s luck”
shtick after all. On the Dreamcast version of the same game, though,
I lost miserably every time. Granted, it did not help that I had
never even played on a Dreamcast, let alone that specific game,
before coming to Otakon 2004.

Once I grew bored of having my ass
handed to me,2
I decided to do some shopping. In addition to the hundreds of
Artists’ Alley wares available, Otakon also has a humongous
Dealers’ Room full of authentic anime videos, manga, games,
shirts, posters, bumper stickers, headbands, real swords and samurai
weaponry, music, DVDs, and so much more.

In the end, I got one shirt from the
Alley and one shirt from the Room. I consider it one of the most
spend-happy hours of my life to date.

I then helped myself to a seafood
dinner at one of the most popular restaurants in the Baltimore Inner
Harbor region... which is to say, I had a fish sandwich at the Burger
King across the street. Then it was after six o’clock, and I
went back to the Alley to see if Scott had shown up yet.

He had.

He and his friend Nix were behind the
counter, talking to fans. It was really obvious Scott had
underestimated the enormity of Otakon; he only brought a few prints
to sell, since none of his t-shirts had arrived in time for the
convention.

I got his picture, blurred and
off-center as planned,3
and he offered to draw a sketch for me. I told him to draw one of his
comic’s characters, an anthropomorphic cat named Aeris, doing
anything but standing still.
My reasoning was simple: Scott usually draws his characters standing
still; he should stretch his art more.

Well, it seems the
long delays in travel that had made Scott late to Otakon had also
worn out his imagination; instead of standing up, Aeris was sitting
down in the final version of the sketch.

I laughed, but I
said it was fine; after all, that’s what I get for not being
specific, right? Scott, however, insisted that the drawing sucked,
and I should bug him for another drawing the next day, after he had
gotten some sleep.

Scott was traveling with an enterage of
sorts. Besides Nix, there were Dave and Layne, two other close
friends of the VGC artist. All four of them, Dr. Grumbles, and I went
to the pizza shop next to Burger King and had a bite to eat with a
side of really interesting conversation. These guys were all great to
talk with, by the way. Even the ones who stay silent most of the time
(only Layne and Scott, really) were cool to be around. I was
flattered to be the dude guiding them to the nearest restaurant, but
really, we were all equals and friends talking to each other,
regardless of who was a bigger Internet celebrity.

Nix apparently knows a lot about
cars... He also showed a certain curiosity as to whether or not his
own vehicle could outrun the Baltimore police... “Hypothetically,”
of course. As soon as I told him the local police tend to drive Ford
Crown Victorias4,
he smiled and said no more. Everyone laughed.

I left when my ride home came at 11:00
pm. I offered to give Scott, Nix, Layne and Dave a ride to their
hotel,5
but the matter became complicated when I did not know exactly where
their hotel was to begin with. So they said they would get a cab, and
we parted ways.

Ben and I met up again (he had spent so
much time in the game room... and, not surprisingly, he had faired
considerably better than I at actually winning some of the games). We
then went home to get as much sleep as possible before Saturday.

--

SATURDAY, JULY 31

The day started with a Webcomic Panel,
where several writers and artists answered questions in front of a
crowd of 400 people for ninety minutes. This was very entertaining,
and I managed to get several out-of-focus pictures of the group.

Matt Boyd, the writer of Mac Hall,
set the mood for the event with the sarcastic introduction: “Welcome
to the Alternative Hentai Panel. Glad you could make it!”

The whole event was like that. I think
the best moment of the panel belonged to the artist of Paradox
Lost.

The answer: This artist goes away from his email from time to time,
but he had just come back after a four-week vacation to read his fan
letters. One of them freaked him out to no end.

Oh, it started out innocent... The letter writer said how much he
loved the comic, that it was great... And then, the same writer said
that the comic was the only thing giving his life any meaning right
now, and that the Paradox Lost updates were keeping him from
committing suicide.

Keep in mind: the artist had not updated for four weeks, and this was
a very old email.

Oops.

...

I spent the majority of the rest of the
day hanging out with Scott and Nix. I know I could have done plenty
of other things while I was there, but honestly: how often does a
person from Baltimore get to meet friends from Canada?

So we chatted and sold coca-cola when
Scott ran out of prints to sell. (Nix had given me $10 the night
before and told me to get as many Cokes as I could. I came back with
four 12-packs, and he started selling them for a dollar a piece.
Scott thought he’d get in trouble, but the security guards
walked right by our table without commenting, so I guess it was cool.
I’d say Nix made a fair profit by the time all was said and
done.)

Scott drew me another picture. I
remembered how “anything but standing still” had not been
specific enough, so this time I requested that he draw Aeris surfing.
I do think Scott put more time into that drawing than anything else I
saw him draw that day... He did most of it while we were taking a
break from the Alley table to play some obscure card game called
“Munchkin” with two other webcomic artists: Tim
Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del, and
Brian Carroll of Instant Classic.
There were also two people whom I did not recognize at the game, and
I forgot to ask their names before they had to leave... But in all,
there were seven of us playing until the Unknown Two left, at which
point we declared Nix the winner and went separate ways.

I followed Scott around, since I had
nothing else to do—I’m so pathetic like that—but we
talked and toured the premises and ate at the pizza place again...
Which wasn’t really necessary, since a few minutes after we
returned to the Alley so he could get back to drawing sketches and
meeting fans, Nix and Tim Buckley were making plans for dinner.

By then it was 9:00pm, and I had to
leave at 11:00, when my ride home would arrive downtown. Nix said
it’d be no problem for me to come along for dinner, since we’d
be sure to get back to the BCC by eleven.

So Tim, Nix, Scott, Brian Carroll, and
I went out into Baltimore in search of food that was not pizza or
Burger King.

--

NOTE: Before I go further, I should
explain the following about Baltimore City:

It’s a shit hole. Seriously, the
entire city is one of the worst urban centers in the country. We get
at least 300 murders every year for the 600,000-person population,
typically, and it would be even more
were it not that we have Shock Trauma, an excellent emergency room
hospital, right in town.

Baltimore is also proud holder of the
national title for the highest percentage of citizens with gonorrhea.
To put this into perspective, Los Angeles is second place.

Add to this the typical July weather,
which, in Scott’s own words, “slaps you like a bitch”
with humidity the second you walk outside, and you get a complete
picture of the murky, putrid, run-down, and ultimately dying city,
where even though the local conventions may be nice, it’s best
to stay indoors when possible.

--

Once we were fully two blocks away from
the BCC, a prostitute came up to us yelling, “Baby, baby, baby,
baby!” When we’d passed, she just looked at us as if we
were one person and said, “Aw, he’s gay.”

One block further, we passed two cab
drivers talking to each other in Jamaican accents. We only caught one
sentence, but it made Nix laugh so hard, he’s turned it into a
catchphrase:

“You bang a sixteen-year-old, and
they throw your ass in jail.”

It’s not that funny a sentence,
really. But it was so random, right after I had told Nix about the
city’s STD statistics... So we all got a good laugh out of that
and moved on.

We would have gone to the Baltimore
Hard Rock Cafe, but they were crowded and had a fifteen-minute wait.
The ESPN Zone, two doors over in the same building complex, had a
table ready for us in under ten minutes, so we took that. I had a
cheesesteak, but the food was hardly consequential compared to the
night’s topic of conversation:

Tim was talking about how he had made
his comic successful at turning a profit, and he spent half an hour
detailing various strategies for self-publishing etc. VGC might be
trying a book sometime in the next year, so this was definitely of
interest. I was particularly alarmed when Tim stated the startup
costs for publishing—he might not want me quoting exact
figures, but suffice it to say, it’s huge.
I give him a lot of credit for making it all work out, and I
sincerely hope he can help Scott do likewise. We shall see...

Back at the BCC, I met up with Ben
again and said farewell to Scott and Nix, knowing full well I had
made some very good friends in two days.

--

ENDNOTES:

I’m not quite sure how to close
this convention report, so I’ll just include some random Otakon
facts.

Approximately 17,000 people showed up, according to the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

Over a thousand came by Scott’s
table; he drew at least a hundred sketches for people over the course
of two days.

Ben participated in the Super Smash
Bros. Melee tournament in the game room. He made it to the second
round, which is better than I could ever hope to do.

Of the cosplayers, the most awesome
costume I saw was of The Cheat from Homestar Runner.
The worst? Well, let’s call that a 500-way tie.

The ESPN Zone kicked ass. Kudos to the
people working there. One criticism: put less cilantro in the nacho
sauce. Other than that, the meals were perfect.